Esports Integrity Coalition aims to clean up competitive gaming

The Esports Integrity Coalition aims to oversee the growing competitive gaming field and enforce industry-wide player behaviour standards

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A new gaming industry body launches today, aiming to hold the growing esports field to higher standards of ethical behaviour and sportsmanlike conduct, and quash corruption.

The Esports Integrity Coalition will focus on protecting the fledgling professional gaming industry from both external manipulation, including match fixing and grey market gambling sites, and internal corruption, with a particular focus on anti-doping procedures.

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ESIC was announced at Lord's Cricket Ground in London, and introduced by Ian Smith, the body's first integrity commissioner. A UK lawyer, Smith's background has largely been in traditional sports such as football and cricket, and he sat on the Athletes Committee of UK Anti-Doping for five years.

Smith says there are four key areas that ESIC wants to tackle. Three - cheating using software hacks such as aimbots; DDoS attacks to slow down opponents' ability to react in matches; and doping - he describes as "easy" to deal with in the longer term. The fourth, match fixing, presents a much bigger - and growing - problem.

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"We've had very prominent arrests in Korea in Starcraft II, and there have been a number of other cases and allegations [...] around fixing," Smith says. "We've found that that's actually pretty low-level fixing, but the main issue is the growth of the esports betting market. Looking at 2015, the legitimate esports betting market was at around the $250m mark. That probably means the illegitimate market [...] was running at around two to three billion dollars."

While acknowledging that those figures are currently "peanuts" in betting terms, Smith adds that projections put the legitimate market at $23bn by 2020 - and the illegitimate market, if current trends continue, at $200-300bn.

"That's the point at which organised crime knows that there's a decent return on any corrupt investment they make in the sport," Smith says.

ESIC aims to be a proactive force in clamping down on such illicit gambling, and work with player bodies to prevent major criminals influencing matches.

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On a player level, ESIC would determine whether inappropriate behaviour - including sexist or racist outbursts as much as cheating - contravened its code of ethics, and punishments would be handed out by an independent disciplinary body. The ESIC Integrity Programme would bind players competing with any aligned body to its rules, and Smith is hopeful that players would be treated similarly to pro-athletes - up to and including industry-wide bans being respected, if implemented.

ESIC launches with the support of esports tournament organisers including ESL and digital festival DreamHack, and recognised esports gambling sites Unikrn and Betway, amongst others. The body will be open to all professional esports stakeholders and will operate with "as much openness and transparency as possible". It is also explicitly not-for-profit, and never will be.

The appearance of ESIC is particularly timely, coming just one day after the gaming scene was struck by controversy over Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). The game, developed by Valve, was at the centre of a corruption scandal involving YouTube streamers not declaring links to a gambling site focused on the game.